Blank page, repetition in UPSEE question paper

Lucknow: Over 20% aspirants who appeared at 33 centres in Varanasi, Ghazipur and Jaunpur districts were shocked to find blank pages and questions repeated in booklets given to them at the UP state entrance examination (UPSEE) for admissions to engineering and other technical courses, on Sunday. The first-time use of biometric attendance put a check on impersonation as it was after several years that no 'munna bhai' was caught in the UPSEE conducted by the APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University.
AKTU vice-chancellor Vinay Pathak said, "We received complaints from two centres in Varanasi regarding misprint in question paper. In all there were 15 such question booklets. We replaced the booklet for students who saw the misprint at the beginning of the exam. To those who spotted the problem later, we provided another booklet. We also provided 15 extra minutes to students for time loss.''
Candidates who appeared for the engineering examination, AKTU's flagship programme, found the paper less difficult than last year. Of the three sections, candidates said physics was the toughest. "In phyics section questions from electro and electro mechanism were tough. The chemistry section was comparatively lengthier,'' said Shivani Ghosh, an aspirant.
Another candidate Amit Kumar said, "With no negative marking, we could attempt all questions. This gives us advantage of attempting all questions even if we aren't sure of the answer. The paper was moderate but it took really long to solve physics questions.''
Hours after the examination was over, answer key was uploaded on the website. To ensure transparency, university will upload the scanned OMR sheets of all candidates in few days so that they can match their answers with those provided in the answer key. A total of 1,42,018 candidates took the test at 231 centres in UP. Outside UP, the exam was held at eight cities where 5334 candidates took the exam. Around 5% students who registered skip the exam.